Dawn of the Dreadfuls
Given my less than positive review of Quick Classics’ Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, writing a review of the book’s successor, Dawn of the Dreadfuls, was never going to be easy.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was without doubt, a poor book. It was clunky, poorly conceived and distinctly lacking in humour. Essentially, it didn’t know what it wasn’t to be. It sold itself as a ‘quirky’ take on the Jane Austen Classic, but failed to be either decidedly original or indeed even slightly ‘quirky’. You could easily argue then that Dawn of the Dreadfuls was almost doomed from the start...
Penned by award-winning author Steve Hockensmith, Dawn of the Dreadfuls is set four years before the events of P+P+Z, and describes the events that lead the Bennet sisters to take their first fateful steps on the ‘path of the warrior’. While P+P+Z took the Jane Austen original and essentially just threw zombies into the mix, Dawn of the Dreadfuls is a far better conceived — and far better written — take on the period-romance-with-zombies genre. Free of the constraints of the Jane Austen original, Steve Hockensmith has taken full advantage of the setting given him and has, I have to say, done a really good job at balancing humour, zombies and Jane Austen-style romance in a book that is both engaging and remarkably enjoyable to read.
While P+P+Z seemed to take me an age to get through, Dawn of the Dreadfuls was an absolute breeze. Nearly every problem I had with the first book just isn’t an issue in its successor. Sure the horror elements are cheesy, but then again the book is supposed to be cheesy — it’s the nineteenth century and there are zombies for goodness sake! The great strength of Dawn of the Dreadfuls is that it gets its tone pretty much spot on. Every zombie incident and every joke is written with an extremely large amount of tongue-in-cheek, and while the first book suffered from being directly tied to the Jane Austen original, Dawn of the Dreadfuls is free from this same inherent problem.
Here in Dawn of the Dreadfuls, the Jane Austen setting is just that — a setting. Dawn of the Dreadfuls doesn’t try to replicate Jane Austen. It doesn’t need to; that’s not the point. What we have here then is a ‘liberated’ book — a book with far better direction and far better writing that its predecessor. Essentially, it’s everything Pride and Prejudice and Zombies should have been, and then some.
I now look forward to the upcoming third book in the series Dreadfully Ever After with a renewed sense of hope!
